SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol)

SCTP is a transport protocol operating analogously to TCP or UDP on top of a connectionless packet service such as IP. It is a unicast protocol, and supports data exchange between exactly 2 endpoints, although these may be represented by multiple IP addresses. SCTP provides reliable transmission, dealing with reordering, duplication and corruption of the packets. It supports full duplex transmission. What makes the SCTP protocol different in comparison to TCP, SCTP is a message oriented protocol (note that TCP is byte oriented). From the beginning it has been designed to behave cooperatively with TCP sessions attempting to use the same bandwidth.

References

• RFC 4960, Stream Control Transmission Protocol, R. Stewart, Ed., September 2007
• www.sctp.org

-- BartoszBelter - 24 Apr 2008